Peter Smith: Blog

One blog I always find myself going back to is by Thomas Bas­bøll, who is the Res­id­ent Writ­ing Con­sult­ant at Copen­ha­gen Busi­ness School. He calls his blog Research as a second lan­guage.

I was promp­ted to men­tion it now as I was read­ing his art­icle Free Time, Blank Pages, and other Cata­strophes. As I hurtle/stumble towards the end of my thesis, I find myself won­der­ing about the prac­tices asso­ci­ated with “doing” a PhD. Here, at the Uni­ver­sity of Auck­land Busi­ness, or at least in this part of the Busi­ness School, a thesis seems to be a largely indi­vidual exer­cise. And yet it doesn’t have to be that way. A col­league has some theses from a renowned Swedish insti­tu­tion. The detailed struc­ture of each PhD thesis is very sim­ilar to each other … down to the num­ber of para­graphs per sec­tion. Clearly there has to be a greater level of con­gru­ence between prac­tices there than, say, where Saku Mantere did his thesis (which exhib­its some lovely ideosyncracies).